See quality take a dive

student demands last year.

The assumption of a CPI-linked fee increase hatched behind closed doors is likely to come to naught if it is imposed without any prior engagement and agreement with students. This should be an elementary lesson learned from the attempt by the minister of higher education and training, Blade Nzimande, together with the universities to impose a unilateral fee increase of 6% in 2015 in response to the students’ demands.

It is telling that the proposed fee increase for 2017 is being mooted prior to the finalisation of the commission’s report as well as the CHE’s advice on fee increases requested by the minister. This suggests that the intention in initiating these formal processes is to legitimise an a priori decision regarding fee increases for 2017.

Indeed, the terms of reference of the commission have been framed narrowly to foreclose any real consideration of the possibility of free higher education. The fact that it must assess, among other things, the feasibility of free higher education in the context of the Constitution is pre-emptive and can only lead to one conclusion, namely that the provision of free higher education is not obligatory on the state, because higher education is not a basic right.

In fact, the commission would be hard-pressed to argue that the state is not fulfilling its constitutional responsibility, for the Constitution obliges the state to take “reasonable measures” to make higher education “progressively available and accessible”. There can be no denying that it is doing so.

The demand for free higher education is a social and political demand that cannot be wished away by recourse to the Constitution. What is required if access to affordable and quality higher education is not to be compromised is national engagement and dialogue with all the key internal and external stakeholders — students, staff, university leaders, business, labour and civil society — to jointly develop a framework and strategy for addressing the funding challenges in higher education.

The key issue that any national engagement process must confront is the desirability and feasibility of free higher education in the context of the current social and economic realities of South Africa as a middleincome developing country.

The fact that access to higher education without financial support is beyond the reach of working- and lower-middle-class students is incontrovertible. It does not follow, however, that the solution is free higher education for all students.

Higher education worldwide, unlike schooling, is elitist and access is restricted to a proportion of the eligible age cohort. This advantages middle-class and upper-middleclass students because of their financial means and access to quality schooling. In effect, because fees constitute a fraction of the total cost of study, their access to higher education is subsidised by lowincome families. Thus, free higher education in the current context will further exacerbate the already high level of inequality in South Africa today.

Similarly, graduates have a greater advantage in terms of employability and high earning potential. This suggests that a bursary and loan scheme such as the existing National Student Financial Aid Scheme (NSFAS) is a fairer way to ensure affordable access to higher education, because it enables recovered loans to be reinjected into the scheme.

Although the NSFAS recovery rate of just under 11% needs to be improved, the roughly R5.4-billion it has recovered since its inception in 1998 is not to be scoffed at. The key challenge confronting NSFAS is insufficient funding to meet rising demand, including to cover the “missing middle”, namely lowermiddle-class students who fall outside the current NSFAS income threshold.

NSFAS has announced that it is developing a new funding model that would bring the “missing middle” into the net. The problem, however, is not the funding model but the quantum of funds available.

A new f u n d i n g mo d e l that increases the number of eligible students will, unless there is more funding made available, exacerbate the current crisis. This is brought into sharp relief by the fact that the government estimates that to cover all the undergraduate students who qualify for NSFAS support — more than 250 000 — would require an additional R10.7-billion a year. And apparently another R20-billion a year is required to ensure that the state subsidy to universities is adequate to meet institutional needs.

This may well be affordable if priorities are shifted, including addressing the huge wastage in resources as a result of corruption, a bloated public service and other extraneous factors. But this is easier said than done: even if resources are freed up, there are other competing social priorities — in health, housing and social development.

An alternative would be to consider introducing a graduate tax, as proposed by Universities South Africa in its submission to the commission. It has the added advantage of covering all graduates, irrespective of socioeconomic status. It was an option when NSFAS was established in the late 1990s and, although indications were that its revenueraising potential was greater than a loan and bursary scheme based on annual fiscal transfers, it was not pursued owing to administrative and political concerns about the robustness of the tax collection system.

These concerns are no longer relevant, given the effectiveness of the South African Revenue Service and the role of the skills levy, which is a dedicated tax. A graduate tax may be worth revisiting because NSFAS, despite the substantial increase in annual allocations, cannot meet the identified need.

There is also enormous wastage in the higher education system, which needs to be addressed. The impressive increase in student numbers, which have doubled since 1994, has not been matched by a concomitant increase in student throughput rates — about 45% of an undergraduate cohort drops out without obtaining a qualification.

Moreover, of those who do graduate, just under half take five or more years to do so. This is an enormous waste of scarce financial resources, and its impact on individual selfesteem and the dream and hope for a better life is immeasurable. The higher education system is failing students — for many of them, access is not an opportunity for improving their life chances and socioeconomic status. Instead, it is a revolving door back into low-skilled, low-paid jobs at best and unemployment at worst.

This is the real crisis in higher education. But, amid all of the noise and demand for free higher education, this simple truth has been ignored. There is no doubt that a lack of finance contributes to the high dropout and failure rates. There are more important factors, such as that students are not adequately prepared to pursue higher education because of the poor quality of schooling. This is not taken into account by the inherited curriculum and qualification structure in higher education, which is not suited to the contemporary context and reality of the socioeconomic, cultural and educational background of the students.

Therefore, a key first step and priority in relieving funding pressures and ensuring that increased funding, if available, does not to lead to further wastage must be to improve the internal effectiveness and efficiency of the higher education system. This requires focused and systemic intervention to address the knowledge and skills gap between school and university by restructuring the curriculum and qualification structure in higher education.

This could be done, as a report commissioned by the CHE indicated, by adding an extra year to the traditional three- and four-year qualifications. The CHE advised the minister in December 2014 to consider piloting a new curriculum and qualification structure along these lines. Although there was widespread, if qualified, support from the universities, there has to date been no indication of a public response from the minister to the CHE’s advice.

Declining state funding and inertia on the part of the government to address this is at the centre of the funding crisis in higher education. To lay the blame at the door of the universities and institutional autonomy, which precludes the state from regulating fee increases — as the secretary general of the ANC, Gwede Mantashe, did last year — is disingenuous. It is an attempt to absolve the state from its responsibility and signals a worrying trend towards curbing institutional autonomy.

This is also i ndicated by the amendments to the Higher Education Act since 2012 as well as the commission of inquiry into free higher education being required to investigate the role of universities’ institutional autonomy in determining the fees. This suggests that political expediency may trump any attempt to find solutions to the pressing issues that confront higher education.

The demand for free higher education may not be desirable or feasible in the short to medium term. If it is to be achieved in the long term, a road map must be developed for getting there, including finding solutions to the immediate funding challenges through an open, honest and transparent national engagement process. This is imperative to avoid a repeat of the standoff between students and universities and to secure the future of a quality public higher education system. — A shortened version of this article originally appeared on theconversation.com